In the fall, as fresh infusions of Arctic air clear the skies, brushing away the soot and haze of summer and building up a pristine lens of high pressure, we like to bundle up, turn off the kitchen lights, and head out to the back deck.
The lack of light pollution in the night sky is one of the glories of Perry County. Try as they might, the sodium crime lights of Harrisburg only manage to create a low corona over the cemetery ridge to our east. Every other corner of the heavens is as clear as black ice.
Of course, there are plenty of manmade objects overhead, everything from commercial jet strobes to the faint flatline of a passing satellite. But there’s something comforting about these lonely beacons. Rather than make the sky feel crowded, they seem to point up the vastness of space, and underscore our insignificance compared with its infinite depth.
But don’t think our impromptu starwatches are all philosophy and gloom. We’re happy to take the sublime down a peg or two as we huddle for warmth. With awe comes laughter, especially when we remember the time a certain columnist got very excited about the bright object streaking in from the west — personally guaranteeing, over the gentle objections of his family, that it was absolutely the returning Space Shuttle — only to find it was really a Continental flight bound for Harrisburg International.
Oops. Embarrassing.
We’ve learned to look for constellations, for the Milky Way, for Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, but, above all, for meteors, those elusive streaks of fire that even self-conscious modern people endow with mystical charms. How else to explain the deeply repressed wishing apparatus that comes creaking to life in the wake of one of those bright marvels? Oh, I saw one! (Did I make a wish in time? Are these the echoes of my wish? Is it too late to make one now?)
Why do we associate shooting stars with luck and divine benevolence, as opposed to, say, lightning, which calls to mind the thunderbolts of an angry god? Surely it has something to do with the feeling that we’re safe from meteors, that here is a celestial phenomenon purely to be enjoyed.
And, in fact, the safety record of meteors is pretty spectacular. In all of recorded history, there’s only a single reliable case of human injury caused by a meteorite: the bruising of Ann Hodges of Oak Grove, Alabama, at 2:46pm on November 30, 1954. Mrs. Hodges was napping on the couch when a grapefruit-sized chunk of space stone called a chondrite plowed through her roof, bounced off the big wooden radio, and landed on her with enough force to bruise her up and down the side of her body.
She became instantly famous, but a custody battle broke out over the Sylacauga meteorite – which was named, as these things commonly are, for the nearest town of any size. The United States Air Force sent a helicopter to collect the valuable chondrite. Mr. Hodges promptly lawyered up and tried to get it back. Then the Hodges’s landlord jumped into the fray, claiming he was entitled to sell the meteorite in order to pay for the damage it had done to his property.
In the end, Mrs. Hodges, tired out by the publicity and all the bickering, quietly donated the pesky thing to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.
There is one other credible claim of a meteorite hitting a young boy in Uganda, but the chondrite in that case was so small that the leaves of a banana tree were strong enough to slow and deflect it, so that when it landed on the boy’s head, he barely felt a thing.
(Which sounds like something written by Rudyard Kipling, even if it is true.)
Of course, the view of meteors as mere fireworks — but with a much better safety record – isn’t very well founded. Meteors remind us that the earth is constantly plowing through a celestial junkyard full of objects small and large. Some of them very, very large.
Take Asteroid 2005 YU55, an object roughly the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier that whizzed past the earth just last week. At its closest approach, YU55 was just a hair over 200,000 miles away from earth, which brought it well inside of the orbit of the moon.
Happily, we’re not in danger of colliding with YU55 in our lifetime. Which is good news. I, for one, would be happy never to see a 70-foot-tall super-tsunami, or watch a city evaporate like in the movies Armageddon or Deep Impact.
But I would like to propose a toast, in honor of YU55’s passing: here’s to meteors, the fleeting wonders of the night sky, and to keeping the gods happy.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 November 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
